In which our bearded protagonist makes a startling discovery…

We had something of a sock-related disaster at Casa MacBride last week. Not the usual type of sock-related disaster, not an ‘Oh my God, I’ve run out of socks!’ thing at all. Quite the reverse. I have more socks than I know what to do with*, it is a sock-plague of Biblical proportions!

The Lord our God didst look down upon the plight of Moses, and being sore vexed did smite the Egyptians with locusts, frogs, and when that didn’t work: socks!

I counted – I’ve got three thousand pairs of the damn things**. Oodles and oodles of socks. My house is Socktopia. I am the Major of Socktown. King of Sockland!

And they’re all black***. Well, they all started off black, but over the years some of them have faded away to an insipid shade of mealy grey. Plus, with the weather being a bit craptastic of late, a lot of them have been dried indoors and so have all the cushiony softness of a stale Ryvita.

The trouble is that I never throw socks away, unless they’ve become kinky peekaboo style socks. The kind of sinful libidinous socks one would find in an Anne Summers catalogue. Socks, where no matter how often you wash them, they’ll always be DIRTY.

Holes in the heel are OK, it’s holes in the toe that inflame the ardour and must be humanely disposed of. Otherwise they’re safe to wear until they fall apart.

Which is why I now have enough socks to coat the bedroom floor to a depth of about two feet. They not only fill my bedside cabinet****, like terry-towling cockroaches, they fill another one out in the hall too. The damn things are everywhere. We don’t need a guard dog, anyone breaking into my house is going to be smothered in an avalanche of socks.

There you go – don’t say I never tell you personal stuff. Now, what kind of underwear are YOU wearing?

* Yes, technically there’s only one thing you’re supposed to do with socks – put them on your feet – but the Red Hot Chilli Peppers showed us all that socks aren’t just to cover up the sinful parts below the ankle. And I know some of you keep your money in them, tied tightly to your genitals to keep them safe from theft. And I suppose I could also put a half brick in one and beat the living crap out of Farmer F-wit who lives up the road. Though I suppose I could use a bar of soap instead of a brick if I didn’t want to kill him… Nah, I’ve got a half brick ready to go, and it’d be a shame to let it go to waste. So there are quite a few things I could do with my mountain of socks, but that would lead to very long, very rambling footnotes, and we don’t want that, do we?** This, of course, is a lie.*** A small exaggeration, I have exactly four pairs of socks amongst the teeming multitude that aren’t the regulation uniform black: one pair of kilt socks (white), and three pairs of beige – brown ones to go with my linen suit. Other than that, I practice strict sock apartheid.**** This is the disaster to which I referred in the header – She Who Must Occasionally Be Trusted On Sock Duty tried to stuff three hundred pairs of socks into a drawer designed for about twelve. An explosion of black sports socks ensued. She’s had to get therapy for Post Traumatic Sock Disorder.

I’m not sure you really want to know, but I’ll tell you anyway as I’m in an over-sharing type mood today. I’m currently keeping my extremities warm with my ‘Moo-Tini’ socks. Which have on them a picture of a Cow attempting to hold a cocktail. I’m now wondering if my obsession with drink has gone a bit too far…

You’re not the only one with an overabundance of socks Stuart. When I moved in my dad was forced to clean out a dresser for me and discovered (much to his horror) that he had two entire dresser drawers full of socks. They’re all either dark blue, dark brown, or black. We truly have no idea what to do with all of them.

Peering under my desk as I type this, I can see that my right big toe is peeking indecorously through a hole in its mid-blue argyll sock, shameless hussy that it is. The left big toe is too modest to show itself, preferring to remain clothed in light grey.

I have an entire clothes basket of unmatchable single socks, many of them white and girly. I shall pack them up and send them to you so that you can video tape some wild sock porn and get stripy zebra socks. Or spotted dalmation socks. Or skunk socks. Or, heck, even mapgpie socks.

Surely I have a box around here, somewhere…

Btw, it must be a guy thing to wear holy socks. I can’t stand it, myself, once my socks get holes, most anywhere, into the waste bin they go. At least now that we’re not almost destitute. When we were broke, I wasn’t so ‘picky’.